Worst Looney Tunes Animation. Ever.

Some might say Daffy Duck and Porky Pig Meet The Groovie Goolies is the worst Looney Tunes ever… and I’d agree with that. But this Italian Tweety and Sylvester commercial for canned De Rica lima beans is so hilariously off-model, off-animated, off-everything… ya gotta love it. (Don’t miss the shot of Tweety’s butt at :36). Here it is. This takes the prize:

Like black velvet paintings, foreign animations of American cartoons are good kitschy fun – if you are in the right frame of mind. For example, Gene Deitch’s Czech-made Tom & Jerry short Dickey Moe will scar your brain – in a good way.

Thanks to cartoon researcher Charles A. Brubaker, I have a few choice examples of the Japanese take on our beloved characters. Check out this anime version of teenage Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm:

If you want to play a drinking game, take a shot everytime a character says “Baby Felix” in this trippy (dubbed) clip from the Japanese Felix The Cat show:

And finally, while we’re at it, check out the first 60 seconds of the embed below – a Japanese take on the MGM cartoon stars that lets Filmation and Deitch off the hook (followed by a Japanese dub of Tex Avery’s Field and Scream, always worth watching in any language).

If anyone has any other example of odd foreign animation of American cartoon stars… let me know in the comments section below.

Nic, speaking from experience with the Disney ducks, there has never been a PAPERINIK (Duck Avenger) animated series. There was this video game several years ago—in which the US translators evidently weren’t aware of the name Duck Avenger.

Nic Kramer

March 06, 2013 6:23:24 am

I know about that video game as there was a whole page about it in a special video game, retail, exclusive, Disney Adventures magazine issue from 2005 or 2006.

Matter of fact, that issue had the misguided fact that there was a “Duck Advenger” TV show in Italy. Why an official Disney publication had a false fact in the first place is beyond me.

The dubbing to the Little Lulu anime was hilariously amateurish. It sounded like it was dubbed by college students (thus reminding me of early anime fandubs)! Cute US theme song, though. Titra/Titan Studios could do a better dub, which isn’t saying much.

Tom and Jerry in Germany retrofitted clips of a few shorts to present each cartoon as an entry in Jerry’s diary. They inserted brief animation of the show’s title and credits by having Tom flip through the diary, I don’t remember if this is the only new animation added but I always found it to be an interesting concept. They also did a few shorts with Jerry narrating the action in German as if he was reading it. Here’s the intro:http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtX2OVhdmQ8

I rather liked the De Rica commercial! I always imagined that Gene Deitch should do Looney Tunes (imagine Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny chasing each other with trippy animation and spacy sound FX!), since he already did Tom & Jerry and Popeye (I enjoyed his works on those), but this came very close!

Did anyone notice that Tweety looks a little bit like Calimero? That’s because this was animated by his creators, Pagot Studios! (Pagot also co-produced the two Calimero anime series with Toei, one in 1972, the other 20 years later.)

I just remembered this strange clip of Betty Boop, it’s in English but my Puritan senses tell me it wasn’t made for an American audience (unless of course it was unauthorized or that an adult audience was in mind). I have no clue to where the clip comes from but the California raisins-esque peeping Tom suggests the 80s:http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfe36kgvfo

I remember watching those Gene Deitch/Chuck Jones Tom & Jerry cartoons alongside the Hanna Barbera cartoons back in the late ’80s to the early ’90s along with the Three Stooges, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, and the post-’48 Looney Toons including Dicky Moe.

I heard that Disney tried to import that to the U>S> on Disney XD, but it got lost in the shuffle (probably because they already had the U,S, show).

Chris Sobieniak

March 13, 2013 4:36:59 pm

It’s interesting that got made at all, and lasted as long as it did (3 seasons, though work switched from Madhouse to Shin-Ei towards the end). Madhouse of course is probably best known for some of Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s works like Ninja Scroll, the stuff they did for Marvel or the 2009 film “Redline”. Shin-Ei has been behind the popular ongoing Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan series themselves.

Speaking of American-adapted anime, leading up to the 1984 Olympics, a Japanese cartoon featuring the Disney Studios-designed Sam the Eagle found it’s way to the airwaves in Japan. I don’t believe it was ever licensed/distributed outside the country, and perhaps for a good reason going by this clip!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbYTpXvuUic